The systems weren’t always a hotbed of substance abuse; in the twenty first century the wonder addiction cure Panacea took humanity by storm. Panacea shut down the part of the brain which released pleasure from passive consumption, and stimulated that which found joy in friendships and social bonding. Panacea was added to the water and sprayed from aircraft but there was a side effect waiting for just the right combination of factors to occur, and they occurred in Britain.
The problem with the British is they think they’re better than everyone else; any Brit can tell you H.G. Wells is superior to Jules Verne as Wells is British and Verne French, and they would be mystified by any suggestion of further information being required. Nobody can work out where this hubris comes from; certainly they had an Empire once, but didn’t everyone? Chile’s just as bad, but Chile didn’t have nuclear weapons; as far as everyone knew Britain sort of leased theirs from the US and carried them around the oceans. It was once little more than a historical footnote that Britain tested its own nuclear bomb in the nineteen-forties, before admitting some years later the device to be a fake; the thing is, you see, it wasn’t. When the US allied with Britain in the Great War, the Americans were introduced to the Secret Intelligence Service; Uncle Sam had never conceived of anything like it and the Special Relationship was born. This relationship lasted until the early nineteen-fifties, when the entire British Civil Service was found to be spying for the Soviets.
Britain still led the free world in lying; hidden in an officially mothballed nuclear silo in the Lake District, the one megaton Angel of Avalon awaited her destiny. As Panacea enhanced local bonds distrust was directed outwards, snowballing into mass xenophobia with catastrophic results. Nowadays just about the only drug banned everywhere is Panacea, although it will always have its devotees in the Alt-anything communities; nothing says you’re on the right track like Babylon prohibiting your sacrament.
Anna punches Miles in the arm; despite herself she’s rather impressed with his performance.
“You jammy bastard! She ate my first boyfriend alive, and he was a Marquess! I thought she was going to set the dogs on you!” There’s a complicated knock at the bedroom door and Miles starts; despite his lucky escape he’s still very scared of Anna’s mum.
“Don’t mess the bed, it’s only Patricia; I told her I’d be here if she fancied a smoke. Come in, Tish!” Soon there is another knock, similarly complicated. Anna and Patricia call as one.
“Come in Perks!” Perks is a housemaid by day, although you wouldn’t know it from the dressing gown and bunny slippers.
“Pardon Lady Patricia, Lady Annabel, I’m to tell you to stop smoking weed in here because the whole wing reeks of it. Mrs. Besom don’t like it one bit and she’s saying she’ll wake the Mistress if it don’t stop.” Anna removes an enormous unlit doobie from her lips.
“Aw; I’ve only just rolled this one!” Perks checks behind herself for Mrs. Besom; always a wise precaution within the walls of the great house.
“Gizza drag then!” She squeezes in between the sisters, and Miles is ignored for a rapid fire three way symposium on who’s had who around the village and other important estate news. Eventually Mrs. Besom arrives to quash the party; the housekeeper ejects three giggly young women and turns to fix Miles with a frown.
“You want to be ashamed of yourself, you do!” As the door is yanked firmly shut Miles sighs, fishes a discarded lipstick stained reefer from the ash tray and sparks up his lighter. If he lived half the life some people imagined for him, he mused, he could die a very happy man.
Breakfast is amazing in country houses, Miles discovered; he couldn’t off hand think of any food groups beyond those represented. Sunday features croquet of all things and Miles is introduced to Patricia’s present beau, a young palaeontologist who is fast making his name in the emerging field of Vengeful Studies. He and his fellows currently devote themselves to finding out who hid all those massive bones, how they did it, and why anyone would play such a mean trick on a species known for obsessing over patterns in chaos. That little quirk may have brought us chemistry and microprocessors, but it also brought us Christ in a cappuccino and the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Miles recognises Damien Fältskog from the night he met Anna; the disputed Marquess shakes Miles’ hand with an easygoing grin, leaning in to address him conspiratorially.
“You must try to stop stealing my dates; I actually like this one!”
“If it’s any defence I had little say in the matter; you’ll have noticed she’s quite bossy.” Fältskog laughs.
“I’m sure we’ve both done better than we deserve; may I introduce the woman in whose shadow I am privileged to dwell, Miss Faith Lancaster.” The girl at his side flushes noticeably as she shakes Miles’ hand.
“Damien’s too modest; he did most of the calculations on bio-entanglement and won’t let me share credit.”
“Busywork and nothing more; I am but a humble foot soldier serving a great general. Shall we?” Fältskog offers his arm to Faith, and right here in the twenty-third century mallets tap balls through hoops on a hundred by fifty foot rectangle of grass in the Lincolnshire countryside.
It’s all very pleasant of course, and their stay ends on Tuesday when Mama’s chauffer picks up Zed and drives them all to the spaceport. The journey is almost over before Miles realises they’re travelling in a Gentleman Bandit; it’s the first time he’s seen one with its clothes on. He questions the driver as they unload the bags.
“Is it true these things can leave Earth?”
“Sure; it’s quicker outside the atmosphere. When her Ladyship visits the estates in New Zealand we pass the Kármán Line.”
“No way! How far could you take one of these?”
“The moon, no problem; they wouldn’t let it land but you could maybe orbit until you got bored.”
“Mars?”
“Unlikely. I wouldn’t say impossible at the right time of year but Venus is right out; people have taken them around the solar system, but they have caches of food and batteries floating all over the place.”
They climb the great gangplank and Miles throws their bags onto the double bunk aboard the tramp streamer Lisa Marie.
“Damien’s alright for a vampire; you totally blew it the night you met me.” Anna cringes.
“God no! We’ve known each other since we were toddlers; he’s like a brother, and my people don’t go in for that sort of thing nearly as much as we used to. You must have noticed we all have chins and perfectly normal teeth nowadays. I’m off to the gaming deck, are you coming?”
“I don’t have your luck; I’m going to stay here for a bit and go through some of these.” He pulls a wedge of old records from a British Museum carrier bag.
“Look at you with your ill gotten gains! Did Zed pinch a player as well?”
“I wish! He made recordings of most of these, but it’s good to have the sleeves; puts it into some kind of context.”
Later, Zed wanders up to Miles’ cabin and enters without knocking.
“Omigosh I’m so dreadfully sorry!” Zed immediately retreats; he calls Anna and tells her to get up here fast. She opens the door a crack and chances a squint through the gap; Miles has headphones on and silent tears are streaming down his face.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” she hisses “You’re his best mate! I was on a roll on the blackjack table too.”
“I am sorry; I do not understand hu-mon emotions” intones the Nef. Anna performs a double take.
“Oho! No speaky English now, is it?” Zed realises this is getting him nowhere.
“You’re his girlfriend! Roll up your sleeves and get your ministering angel on! Whatever this is, man stuff it is not!” Zed stumps off down the passageway; Anna sighs and enters the room.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Fine. If you want me I’ll be in the casino.” She turns to leave.
“No; wait!” Miles composes himself and tries to ex
plain. Anna sits on the bunk beside him.
“It’s these songs; maybe it’s hearing them all at once but it’s overwhelming! How can I add anything to this canon?” Anna picks up a sleeve depicting a pasty young lad in a scruffy cap, his cocky sneer a façade behind which a mess of explosive insecurity was looking for a way out. She wondered briefly where she’d seen it before, and then remembered she lived with Miles.
“Hon, these guys weren’t gods. There was just a hole in the world and this kid fell into it; if he’d missed his break someone else would have filled the space. This stuff isn’t rocket science; it’s not even geology.”
“They’re good though, some of this…” he waves a faded studio shot of a sharp suited man sitting with a flat top guitar, his hat at an angle “you can hear two guitars being played but there’s just this one guy! I thought we nailed it with the band, before I heard any of this stuff, but there’s a whole other level I never even imagined; I feel stupid, and arrogant, and ashamed, and it’s like we had everything and now we’ve got nothing.” Anna gripped his shoulders and looked him in the eye. He had that same dilated stare she remembered from the bathroom mirror after her poltergeist; a mind blinking in the headlights of something more than it could immediately handle.
“Listen to me; whenever you do a show there’s going to be people working the bar who sing better than you, and people sweeping the floor who play better, but not one of them can be you even if they tried for a million years. It’s just a personality cult; exploit it.”
They return to the casino and Miles finds Zed propping up a bar from which they can observe Anna owning the table; there was already a mounting pile of chips, and he reckoned he had about forty minutes until the house ordered her off. Blackjack is not gambling where some people are concerned; a die or ball may come down the same every time, but here each card meant that card was no longer in the deck. You just had to pay attention and count; Anna had no idea why people got so uptight if they were going to make it that easy. She’s not wrong, muses Miles; I should ask Zed more deep stuff. Right. Secrets of the Ages; go!
“Can I ask you something personal?”
“Depends how personal; give it a shot.”
“How big were you at birth? I mean to say, if you give it a moments thought you realise a woman couldn’t give birth to a giant baby.”
“We’re similar to Ligers.”
“What’s a Liger?”
“Ligers are the biggest cats on Earth; they’re the offspring of lions and tigers, which are the same genus but different species. Females from one species have a growth inhibiting gene and males from the other have it, but not the other way around; without human fathers, nothing in our DNA told us to stop at six foot.” Miles tries to think of another.
“How did you survive the flood?”
“We built boats lad, we weren’t stupid. You wouldn’t believe humanity back then; you couldn’t trust them to sit the right way on a toilet. Noah had idiot proof instructions and still used Egyptian cubits by mistake; you should have seen the size of the thing!”
“They would have been glad of the space after forty days; imagine the dung!”
“It was less than a fortnight, although I agree there was probably a lot of shovelling involved; forty anything used to just mean a long time. Fact is we’re overdue a good flood, yours was the fourth but that rainbow’s going nowhere.”
“Oh, here’s a good one; Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Yeah that happened.”
“No way! Fire and brimstone raining from the Heavens?”
“Well, that part of the coast is made of rock sulphur and the whole area’s a bugger for earthquakes, pun not intended, but this was a real nasty one like magnitude six. One minute the ground’s in the air and the next coming back down on fire; the entire region’s volcanic. I’m not saying it wasn’t judgement, but the twin cities were always an accident waiting to happen; anything Divine is physically possible, otherwise it couldn’t be done. Take your man Jesus feeding the multitude.”
“Well that clearly was magic.”
“Not when everyone’s packing kosher; leaving the house without clean food would be like you leaving your weed behind.”
“Literally never happens” confirmed Miles, patting a jacket pocket.
“It was a miracle alright; one man made five thousand strangers share, but it wasn’t supernatural.”
“Didn’t a guy get filmed walking on water once? I’m sure I’ve seen the footage.”
“That was an illusion, and very different anyway. The stunt was performed on a calm stretch of urban river, not four miles out to sea with the wind blowing a hooley but again, if it was done it can be done; impossible things do not happen.”
“What went on in Gomorrah anyway? Is there such a thing as gomorry?”
“It was widespread once upon a time, but no more. Gomorry is why your chakra is now closed, and also the reason unicorns hide when they hear humans approaching.”
“I know people who are obsessed with opening their chakras.”
“Really?” This is news to Zed, who visibly shudders. “Every single copy of the Kama Sutra was hunted down and position sixty five ripped out.”
“Couldn’t God just use the Mandela effect to change the books?”
“The Mandela effect is not real; humans are just not very good at managing memory. You think of memory as a video camera, but it’s only a dataset; you can add or remove things at any time, and so can other people. If somebody said Blue Cheer used to be green, half the humans you meet would swear blind they remember those. It’s literally the reason you’re a social species; without consensus not one of you would remember to pull your pants on in the morning!”
“Bit harsh. What about those monks who remember everything, the first contact guys?”
“Ah, you’re talking about the Brotherhood of Stellar Friars. They train their memories; it’s a life consuming discipline with them. If they neglect their mental exercises they lose everything, decades of work wasted.”
“Heavy.”
“No worse than being an athlete or a dancer.”
“Do you know if there’s a Hell or not?”
“How would I know? I’m not dead yet! I’m pretty sure we’re all going if it’s real. Nobody’s perfect; even Jesus had a temper on him. He was once on a charge for public disorder and vandalism in a temple, until he explained the wine thing to the magistrate. If Pilate hadn’t been a teetotaller things could have been very different.”
“Water into wine! There you go, that was a miracle!”
“Water into something largely composed of water?” Miles hesitates before realising he probably won’t understand the physics.
“This is the least illuminating theological discussion I’ve ever had. It’s almost like I believe less for it.”
“Well yeah, that’s the trouble with knowing; it’s got no soul value.”
Back of the Solway, Proxima Road
Saturday Morning
Lenny Deadman is upbeat and chipper despite having been roped in early to help move the heavy ghost recorder to the Solway, which is to serve as a temporary recording studio. Once it is in position he has something to show them.
“I have adapted a rearset for musical purposes.” Their motorcycles had been stripped of heavy blast shielding and anything not required for forward motion, remaining metalwork was drilled with holes to further lighten the load and Deadman knocked up a couple of modifications in the machine shop. The original handlebars were chopped and lowered, enabling the rider to get down over the tank as the air pressure at a ton could tear you from the bike. The footrests and their controls were moved backwards via a system of linkages, and Miles could see a similar arrangement had been applied to a heavy bass drum beater. Deadman stamps rhythmically on a pedal, and the beater waves to and fro like the needle of a metronome.
“Ingenious, but why?”
“I can operate the bass drum with my foot; I’ve got two arms free to smack an
ything I like now. Check it out.” Deadman bolts the contraption to the rim of an upended drum, gives a few experimental thuds then rattles off a complicated pattern making full use of cymbals and smaller drums suspended on a tubular metal frame; Miles is impressed.
“Man! It sounds like two percussionists playing!” Jenny became a bassist by default as the position was vacant when she joined the pit band, but she’s a small woman and has difficulty with the upper reaches of what is after all a very large instrument. The electrification project has seen her start again from first principles, and she too has something to show and tell. It’s a bass neck bolted to a lump of wood, with wires running hither and thither under the strings and around the bridge and tailpiece. Jenny hangs it on herself guitar style and plugs into the mixer; it sounds deep and warm, but with an edge of distorted sustain which increases the harder she plays.
“I call it the su quattro because it’s got four strings; reckon there could be a market for these.” Miles has a question.
“Why only pluck it though? You could use a bow on this.” Jenny shakes her head.
“Gut strings don’t electrify as well, and playing a guitar with a bow would look a bit silly now, wouldn’t it?”
They’ve all weekend to dick around with the ghost recorder; relatively productive bursts of recording are punctuated by regular ‘rest periods’. They’ve been hammering out their sound for a few weeks now, but have yet to be heard by anyone other than Zed, Anna and the bike club. Miles brings this up during a front bar session.
“Where can we play? The only place I can think of around here is the social club; it holds about a thousand and has a huge in-house sound rig.” Jimbob folds his arms and shakes his head.
The Only War Page 5